I still remember one of my first encounters with Donald
Rumsfeld. I had recently relocated to Washington, D.C. and spent
some time working in his office. We were discussing something not
all that pertinent. Responding to a question, I began, “Quite
honestly.” He interrupted me.
“Nick, don’t preface something you say with ‘quite
honestly.’ It assumes everything you said before that wasn’t
honest.” Rumsfeld flashed his toothy grin and we went on about our
day.
The experience gave me a great deal of respect for a man I
had been taught to hate. As a student, my political science (and
sometimes even mathematics) professors frequently sniped at the
Bush administration’s handling of the war. The class curriculum and
assigned reading was constructed around their own policy
prescriptions; ones that obviously weren’t being enacted. The
sniping commentary bared their frustration.
Now, as retired Bush administration officials have
released their memoirs, much of the Left’s frustration has become
indignation. They’re indignant that their policy schemes were not
only not implemented, but that much of their criticism during the
early stages of the execution of the war turned out to be gravely
misplaced. As President Obama learned, it is quite a bit easier to
campaign than to govern.
And so, the Left uses the review of a memoir as their
last-ditch-effort to win an ideological battle with the Bush
administration. Instead of offering new suggestions for what the
Obama administration calls an “Overseas Contingency Operation,”
reviewers accused former President George W. Bush of trying to
“rewrite his presidency.”
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called my old
boss’ memoir Known and Unknown a “brazen effort
to…distort history.” Now, as former Vice President Cheney begins
his memoir rollout, Time’s Barton Gellman reviewed his
book under the title, “In New Memoir, Dick Cheney Tries to Rewrite
History.”
The truth is that the Bush administration memoirs take
history head on. In Known and Unknown, for example,
Rumsfeld was undeniably candid on serious points of criticism,
particularly concerning appropriate troop levels in Iraq. Rumsfeld
admitted, “it’s possible there may have been times when more troops
could have been helpful.”
Previously, former President Bush wrote in Decision
Points that he regretted “cutting troop levels too quickly.”
Ultimately, Rumsfeld told Diane Sawyer, “the path you didn’t take
is always smoother.”
Bush also openly discusses the federal government’s
involvement, or lack thereof, in Hurricane Katrina recovery. He
confesses that he “should have recognized the deficiencies sooner
and intervened faster.” Even Cheney details how one hunting
accident, which proved to be endless fodder for late night
comedians, was the “saddest” day of his life.
Still, reviewers accuse administration officials of not
adequately addressing public concerns during their time in office.
The New York Times insisted that Bush “hops and skips
over” many criticisms hurled at his presidency. Yet, in nearly all
of these typical reviews, the reviewers rehash old quotes and
anecdotes from low-level bureaucrats that they expect to
effectively trump first-hand accounts of the individuals who
actually made decisions.
Somehow the reviewers expect the Bush administration
officials to suddenly walk back all of their decisions and
apologize.
The impression any reader should get from all this is not
that the Bush administration is trying to “rewrite history,” but
that these memoirs are a reflection of their slice of history. They
are a recounting of their participation in momentous historical
events. Along the way they all intersected with each other, had
disagreements, dealt with unexpected circumstances, and made
judgment calls according to the information they had at the
time.
Should reviewers give the memoirs more than just a
“Washington read” (meaning “reading from the index”) they will
discover the memoirs indicate a sober kind of honesty that only the
experiences written about could produce.
